Is anonimity on Android 10+ phone possible?

dragonzzz

I want to anonymously use a closed-source app that tries to log everything about its user on my personal LineageOS phone with no google services or microg installed on it. What can I do for that without buying another phone or running an emulator on my PC? The app doesn't require a Google account tied to me. My LineageOS build uses Android 12 version, and I found information that Google has been tightening permissions for all kinds of access to phone-unique data to 3rd-party apps since Android 10, including IMEI, MAC addresses etc.

https://developer.android.com/training/articles/user-data-ids

On the other hand, I believe it is foolish to trust Google's intentions on hiding user data from data preyers as Google itself. I decided to post it here because I think Graphene OS users are heavily interested in anonymity.

[deleted]

I do not see like the equation that you are seeking would work

Lineage OS + closed source app that logs everything about user! + "something that we would advice" won't give you more anonymity on the internet. And why would you even think about installing a closed source app that would log anything that you do on your phone? If it's closed source you can only hope that it does what it says. Also if it can log anything, it must have some elevated permissions and/ or run all the time. It is like some Monty Python quest where you would invite some random stranger to watch you 24/7 just to assure you that you have perfect anonymity.

If you want anonymity think twice what and if you really want to share something online and with what means.

By the way, those things that you mentioned in your post about Google tightening those permissions seems to me like a good thing from Google, not bad at all.

Good luck in your searching.

dragonzzz

[deleted] And why would you even think about installing a closed source app that would log anything that you do on your phone? If it's closed source you can only hope that it does what it says.

Hi. Android 10 and later versions assure that no identifying information(IMEI, MAC addresses, ANDROID_ID field and others) is logged. This is the only type of information I want to hide from the app. Of course I will be not providing any personal identifiable information about myself to the app like emails, first name last name, personal phone number as an example.

From my research I can tell that Android 10+ does not reveal identufying information EXCEPT phone model information, installed apps and their installation times. I am ok with sharing it because I think that it does not say a lot about me.

So it must be acceptable to use this app on my personal phone. The only thing I am not sure is if Google really is intent on hiding identifying information like that. What if it does not hide all identifiable information but only a subset of it.

But I can suppose from your answer that Google is really doing what it says so one can use Android 10+ and be sure that the Android OS itself does not allow access to user-unique information

mythodical

While you can't prevent logging within the app itself, you should be able to prevent the app from having network access by using NetGuard or similar while on LineageOS.

With GrapheneOS, you could easily toggle the network permission of any app, without losing the ability to utilize a VPN.

unwat

dragonzzz

Some more info can be found in the hardware identifiers section and the following non-hardware identifiers section on the GrapheneOS website. Most of the stuff written about there applies to AOSP, not just GrapheneOS.

Apparently there's also ways for apps to learn more about the owner of the phone because of the Zygote app template. It's written about here: https://grapheneos.org/usage#exec-spawning (skip the first and last paragraphs since they're about GrapheneOS).